This Is Not A Drill: Wild Dog Is Going To Be On ‘Arrow’ Next Season

I honestly thought we were past the point where superhero TV and movies could surprise me anymore. I mean, we're two years out from a movie where a Celestial showed up on screen and an Academy Award-nominated actor talked about the Nova Corps, and last year's TV season brought us Gorilla Grodd as a full-on telepathic talking super-gorilla who fought the Flash and an entire show about the Atom, Captain Cold and Hawkgirl flying through the time stream to fight Vandal Savage. We are, I thought, long past the point where just telling me a character's going to show up on a TV show is worth getting excited about.

The news comes courtesy of Entertainment Weekly, with the news that Wild Dog will be portrayed by Rick Gonzalez of Mr. Robot and Reaper. If you're not familiar with the character, don't worry; created by Max Alan Collins and Terry Beatty as a hyper-violent vigilante with an identity so mysterious that even readers didn't know who he was at first, he's relatively obscure. He only major roles involved headlining a four-issue miniseries from 1987, a one-shot follow-up in 1989, and one of the stories from the weekly anthology era of Action Comics, in which he helped to make America safe for pornography.

In other words, he's exactly the kind of deep-cut weirdo that I love, but never expected to see on television, even in an era where Firestorm was a major character on a weekly television show. As for how he'll be portrayed on Arrow, that remains to be seen, but at the very least, our own Matt Wilson will have something to look forward to this fall.